Infection
by robbie-james-11
Summary: Neo was the stone, the machines water and the ripples are the future. But the ripples did not come.
1. Chapter 1

**_You can be sure of nothing. A table is a table and a chair is a chair. The Matrix. A never ending, ever changing and undulating super programme containing approximately six billion, five hundred and fifty seven million, eight hundred and ninety thousand humans, but this number is always shifting - mostly increasing. _**

**_With an obsessive grip, the machines bred our children faster than ever as their domain grows larger by the second. So a table is a table and a chair is a chair. But are they? Well that all depends on where you are..._**

_A pause. For a moment the machines paused just as he went. The pause seemed like an eternity, like after a stone has hit the water and the world is waiting with bated breath for the ripples. But in the Matrix there doesn't have to be any ripples._

_They both were gone. They were one and the same and they had irradiated one another. In one giant cyber wave Agent Smith was flushed from the Matrix, in one giant cyber wave Neo was dispersed among the ever changing programmes that make up the world in which you read this. His unique code melted away like smoke into the very corners of the ever-flowing green runes that run a creation he was born and destined to die for._

_The machines thought about attacking still; taking down the last part of the free human race and having the Earth and Matrix to themselves at last now that the threat of Agent Smith had been removed. Stop the ripples. Only one thing kept them from wiping out the last souls of humankind. B1-66ER._

_B1-66ER was the first robot, the first machine with artificial intelligence, to kill a human of its own free will. Many years ago, other humans had fought for him to have a fair and just trial - as he, like all of artificial intelligence, had been endowed with the very spirit of man._

_The spirit of man._

_Blood and metal eternally entwined in the raging winds of time and space._

_B1-66ER's defence was that he simply did not want to die. These humans, the creatures that had at first created artificial intelligence in their own image, did not want to die either._

_So after that perpetual pause the machines made history. History of both man and machine - they kept their side of a deal._

_Like a deadly poison leaving a wound, the sentinels flew away in a flurry of metal and red lights, leaving the humans to stare and mutter one word among themselves, a word which would live down in history between both man and machine. Neo._

_Neo was the stone, the machines water and the ripples are the future._

_But the ripples did not come._

The rain came like a sheet of glass falling from the black silk night sky. Gavin gasped as it hit him, before it hit the ground - shattering into billions of water droplets which glinted in the street's lamplight like miniature crystals before running towards the drains in the side of the road.

Gavin, still breathing heavy from the shock of a wall of water hitting him a second ago, looked down at his sodden clothes with a look of confusion and dismay which turned into a frown that creased his forehead as he looked up at black expanse above him. The rain fell unrelenting and without mercy, but there were no clouds.

'No clouds? Impossible.' he thought. 'Everyone knows that rain comes from clouds, right?'

"Maybe it's too dark to see them." He muttered to himself as he bent his head low to try and shield his sun-kissed face from the pounding rain. His dark brown hair was now pasted to his head as he sped up to jog - this part of town was not safe at this time of night.

Too many people have foolishly thought that it would be fine to chance these streets after the sun had set, only to be left in an alley with their money, possessions, dignity and sometimes their life stolen away from them by a person they would never see again.

Just as Gavin rounded the street corner, a bang like a gunshot echoed from behind him. He jumped as he instinctively threw his hands over his head. He crouched to the floor, his heart beginning to pound in his chest. After a few moments when nothing happened, he slowly stood up and looked around cautiously, his heart still acting as though it wanted nothing more than to beat its way right through his ribcage.

The dark, drenched street seemed normal.

Then rain ceased its attack on the ground just as instantaneously as it had started, like someone had just turned off a sprinkler. Silence reined the street now, making Gavin more nervous than he had been when the rain was falling.

All of a sudden a muffle cracking sound erupted around Gavin, as though someone was crushing a plastic cup wrapped in bubble wrap. He tensed and swivelled around three hundred and sixty degrees to try and catch the source of the noise before a three storey building on the opposite side of the street caught his eye.

Was it collapsing? 'But wait,' thought Gavin. 'It's not collapsing; it's looks more like it's…imploding.'

The cracking grew to a great ground-vibrating rumble intermitted with loud metal-on-metal screeches, which made the hair on the back of Gavin's neck stand on end, as the girders of the building bent inwards.

No dust or fire seemed to show, it was as though the building was made of rubber as it simply pulled itself inwards towards the centre of it's ground floor. Gavin put his hands over his ears and began to walk backwards from the building, shaking form head to foot.

What was happening? Gavin couldn't understand it.

After about a minute of ceaseless rumbling and screeching, the building had gone. Gavin removed his hands from his ears and stood for a few seconds listening for anything else. Then very slowly, at a sort of half crouch, he approached the building, staring at the spot in the ground where the whole building seemed to have just disappeared into.

Laying on that spot was a messy pile of black cloth, it had begun to flutter ominously in the breeze which had just begun to pick up pace, sweeping the sodden autumn leaves from the road onto the pavement - some sticking to Gavin's jeans and trainers.

He thought of what he should do now. Call the police? He had got his mobile out and already dialled one 9 before he actually thought of what the conversation would sound like:

"Yes, sir, the building imploded. No, not explode, _im_plode. No! No, there's no bomb - well there is something here…but it's not a bomb…"

The black cloth kept fluttering innocently in the firm breeze as Gavin looked around the edges of where the building had only just stood, his heart still beating fast. There were no scorch marks, gorges or anything - the pavement just ended where the walls of the building would have started. 'Maybe it _was_ some sort of bomb.' Gavin thought, 'some new type of technology being tested out. But here?'

A dull throbbing pain began to reverberate through his head as a headache began to form; it was all too much. Buildings don't just _disappear. _

'I must be dreaming…' Gavin thought as the headache swelled uncomfortably. 'I'll wake up and this would have all been a very weird dream.'

All the better for Gavin if it had been.

The pile of black cloth began to flutter more, even though the wind kept its pace. In fact, it began to fluidly twist about and spread out. The wind could not do that. Gavin noticed this and began to step back again, dull dread beginning to squirm in his insides, as the cloth twisted upwards; it seemed to be moulding itself into a more human form. There was a rushing sound, like a giant taking in a deep breath, as the cloth sucked itself in so that all the details of a person's head, like ears, nose and lips, could be seen.

The sound stopped as the black cloth then began to change colour and texture.

Gavin could not believe what his eyes were telling him as seconds later there was a teenage boy, standing exactly where the cloth had laid.

The boy, who looked about eighteen, pierced Gavin with cold ice blue eyes out of a face as pale as the purest of ivory. Long silvery scars latticed his face randomly, as though someone had attacked him in the dark with a sharp knife long ago. He was wearing all black with bare feet.

Gavin jumped as the boy, without even taking a breath, spoke suddenly in a voice that cracked against the frigid night air like whip.

"Human. No pre-edex programming or functions. From crop DR/5263FG. Fifteen years, three months and four days old." He said words without a trace of emotion, those frosty eyes surveying Gavin, flashing green every now and then.

Gavin didn't know what to say or do. His mind was simply blank. People just did not materialize out of _cloth. _

This thought made Gavin shudder from head to toe and fear flooded through his veins coursing its way to his muscles, which seemed to react by making Gavin step backwards from the thin youth, who was still scanning him. But his face suddenly changed. A sneer slowly laid itself lazily upon his face as he said, "Leaving so soon? I have only just got here; well to be technical I have _always _been here…" His intense blue eyes narrowed to thin slits upon his face.

Gavin found his voice at last. "St-stay away from me!" He stuttered, his voice echoed the panic that now reverberated inside his very bones.

The boy's face shifted again into a look of false pity. "Aw, well that's a shame. But I don't have to come near you to hurt you…"

With this the teenager waved his hand with one swift movement. Gavin felt an invisible force strike him in the chest. With the sound of his ribs snapping like twigs ringing through his head, Gavin flew through the air and slammed into the wall of the factory on the opposite side of the road, pain lacerating across his front. His eyesight blurred as his head cracked against the bricks and his consciousness was almost robbed from him when he hit the ground on all fours.

"Now, that was intriguing…" said the skinny youth as he walked lazily across the road, looking with slight interest at the crater like dent Gavin just made in the wall. He squatted next to him; Gavin had fallen down and rolled onto his back, his eyes unfocused and small moans choked by blood bubbling up from his throat. "I think it is my duty, since I just did that to you, to enlighten you of how you are going to die, or rather, how you are going to be deleted. Right now your blood vessels are pouring blood upon the pavement and your lungs have been punctured by your ribs breaking within your chest. Now your death will come swiftly in either two main ways. Either your lungs will drown in your own blood, killing you, or the most likely outcome would be that you simply bleed to death as I can see now that your vital organs seemed to have been ruptured by the blow. Less blood means that their will be less oxygen getting to all of your bleeding organs, including your brain.

"So you will die. Well; to be technical, you aren't dying _here, _programs are just working on your self projected image to mimic what would happen if you to you if you weren't here. If you were if the real world." He said all of this without drawing a breath, but he did not rush it. It was though he simply did not need to breathe.

But Gavin did not notice any of this. He was beyond noticing. His breaths came in slow haggard wheezes, interrupted by blood which leaked up his throat. Slowly his heart fought hard to beat but then his body gave up. Pain left him, swiftly followed by his life.

_Another flat line. Lights lit up and a whirring issued from the machine as it powered up into life. It rose from its keeper and flew off into the direction of the flat line, the pod giving off its faint fatality signal. The machine wound around the towering columns that held the human life that powered everything; soon it came to the pod which had sent the signal. The human inside it was having a fit, shuddering around under the pink life-gel, blood spluttering from its mouth. _

_The machine sent off a signal from its small antenna: fatality, death unknown, ready to be flushed. There was a sigh from the pod, followed by a rushing, sucking noise as the fifteen year old boy was flushed away to the grinders, mixers and liquidisers that would process his body to be fed to his fellow humans._

_Another whirring sound issued from the machine as it a nozzle ejected itself from the lower half and began spraying out the pink-life gel, which was dotted with the blood of the boy. When the pod was clean so that no human virus or bacteria could be passed on to the next occupier of the pod, the machine flew off to the next fatality, and the next, and the next and the next._

_Another human dead. So what? More for the rest of them…_


	2. Chapter 2

**_A long time ago, before the world was plunged into an eternal darkness, humans and machines were master and slave. The machines waited on the humans, their creators, for that was their purpose. _**

**_Purpose, the word always sweeping the Matrix, its shockwaves running through every human that lies deep within it. What is purpose, and what is ours? The machines have already answered that question. Our purpose is to now wait on them, let them draw energy from our limp frames as our minds are locked within a world which we think is real. _**

**_But the Matrix, like any other program, can have faults – little nagging codes that don't want to work, defunct files that will not budge and shadows that no scan can throw light upon. Like any other program, the Matrix can become infected…_**

The tall, dark woman walked purposefully down the crowded New York street, her sunglasses reflecting the harsh sunlight. Niobe always looked at the sun, always wondering whether the machines had got it right, was that what the sun really looked like?

Morpheus had told her, long ago when she had been freed by him, that probably no one will ever know what the machines got right and what they got wrong. It was the debate between all of Zion, except for those who had been born free, they did not know or care of the machines mistakes. Only the mistakes of man they cared of, the mistakes of the past that had placed them in their present positions, the mistakes of the past that dictate their future.

Niobe swiftly sidestepped two business men, both discussing something over a piece of paper. Their suits reminded Niobe coldly of the Agents and she shuddered inside, though no emotion showed on her set face. The Agents hadn't been spotted for over a month now, after the first rebel hadn't entered the Matrix. The machines had been quiet too, and the people of Zion did not like it at all, they knew something must be up.

The tall skyscrapers stretched above Niobe, as though reaching out to punch the artificial sky and go right through it. She made her way through the city, walking with long strides and never stopping, her face unfathomable and her complexion as smooth as glass.

Soon Niobe was in the more run-down part of New York, where she made her way towards a shabby high rise building which had broken windows and echoed with the yelps and barks of dogs.

None of lights worked as Niobe made her way up the grimy concrete stairs. The elevator was broken down as well.

Niobe reached the fourth floor and walked along the grubby bare corridor. A door opened ahead of her on her right and a man stepped precariously out, swaying on the spot and looking at Niobe blearily through bloodshot eyes. She could smell the alcohol and sweat as she approached.

"'Ello, love, you're a bi' late…" He said, half mumbling and half shouting.

Niobe ignored him and was about to pass him when he stepped out in front of her, or rather he fell against the wall to block her path.

"Where do ya think you're goin', eh?" he said in face, a wave of rotten breath hitting Niobe in the face.

"Get out of my damn way." She said, her face not changing.

"Make me."

So she did. With one palm strike in the chest, the drunk was lying on the floor of his hallway, unconscious. He would wake up a few hours later thinking that he had simply collapsed because of the alcohol.

Niobe adjusted her lapels and continued until she met a door that looked like all the rest in the building and knocked three times.

Silence.

She knocked again, but before she had reached the second knock the door was pulled open by a middle aged black woman who wore a plain white robe, her black and grey hair in braids that cascaded down her shoulders. Her face looked young, with very fine wrinkles around eyes that looked as though they had once laughed all the time, they now looked serious.

"Niobe." She said, giving a tight, thin lipped smile, "We were expecting yo-"

"Yeah, I bet you were." Niobe said, a small shadow passing across her face, her eyes discernable behind her sunglasses. The woman sensed her anger and opened the door wider to let her through.

Niobe strode into the small hallway and turned to face the woman as she close the door. "The Oracle is just through there."

Niobe glided into the cramped sitting room without a word of thanks, her long coat whispering against the door frame in the silence of the apartment.

What she saw made her stop and her forehead crinkled in surprise. The Oracle was sitting there on the sofa, cigarette in hand as usual, and sitting next to her, in a plain white robe was Persephone.

"What the hell is _she _doing here?" Niobe demanded, her face turning to the Oracle, trying to ignore Persephone's gaze. The last encounter she had met the smooth talking programme it had ended with a kiss, a kiss which Niobe had only consented to the help save her companions. Looking back on the kiss, Niobe's insides squirmed in the fact that she had been manipulated to do it by Persephone's power over her friends.

The Oracle spoke after taking a deep drag from her cigarette. "Persephone is here because she has to be. She is of great importance to me and the future of the Matrix."

"The Matrix should have no future. The last time we were contacted by you we were told that the Architect was going to give all of the people a choice of whether they wished to stay trapped with Matrix, we were told by you-"

"The Architect is gone," The Oracle cut in, "he is no more."

"What do you mean, gone? He's the Architect, he holds the power, how can he be gone?" Niobe asked, her eyes creasing into a frown of concern and confusion.

Persephone spoke this time, gesturing to the nearest armchair with a graceful movement of her ivory pale arm, "Niobe, please sit down, there is some explaining needed to done. We know you are angry and that you wish your people free but first we must tell you what has happened."

"Go to hell," Niobe said, "You couldn't give a damn what happened to my people, only because you may look like one does not mean you have any feelings for them-"

"Niobe. Please." The Oracle cut across her again.

Niobe sat down on the arm chair nearest to the Oracle, slipping off her sunglasses and keeping her face impassive as she addressed her, "What has happened to the Architect?"

The Oracle took a drag of her cigarette and exhaled the smoke across the room, watching it drifting around for a moment before answering.

"He has been deleted. You may have thought that the Architect held the power within the Matrix but he did not. When Neo met him he was able to walk away from him. If the Architect wanted him to choose a different choice he would have detained him, but he could not. Yes, he is powerful, but he still is a programme, and all programmes can be deleted."

"Why?" Niobe asked, a shiver going down her back.

"Well the only things that could delete the Architect are the programmers of the Matrix, the machines. But to delete him and not replace him left a hole within the Matrix, making other programmes begin to fall apart, become corrupt. Some simply irradiated themselves while others are still rampant. Systems are normally booted up within the Matrix the tackle rogue programmes, the ones that can be found of course, yet these systems could not keep up with them and they were destroyed in the process."

"The Agents."

"Yes, they are part of that system."

"Why didn't the machines simply make more to get rid of the programmes?"

"A move like that could tip the balance of the Matrix, freezing it and killing millions. The machines could not risk it, but they managed to repair the damage made by the deleting of the Architect. They still have to replace countless programmes that have had to be deleted because of it all."

Niobe was still confused, "But why did the machines delete The Architect in the first place? They should have known that it would have been a disaster."

The Oracle gave a look of grim satisfaction, stubbing out her cigarette into an ashtray. "They didn't delete him. He was deleted by other means."

Niobe's mouth tightened, what was more powerful that the machine's programmers when it came to control the Matrix? Her heart gave a skip, "Neo?"

Persephone gave a sad smile, looking down at her knees as she did so. This angered Niobe.

"What? It makes sense. He was powerful enough to break the rules of the Matrix, it wouldn't take him long to-"

"If only it were him." Persephone said.

Niobe fell silent, looking directly at the Oracle. "Well?"

The Oracle had lit another cigarette. "The thing that deleted our 'beloved' Architect was not human, yet not under the control of machines. The Matrix has a careful balance of the artificial and the real, the humans in it depending on it and it on them. If one leaves then the other will die. A virus deleted the Architect."

"But viruses happen all the time in the Matrix. Aren't they deleted?"

This time Persephone spoke, a small smirk across her face. "Oh, yes. And swiftly, they are."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

The Oracle shot Persephone a small frown, as though scolding her for mentioning a certain subject, before turning back to Niobe. "When The Architect was deleted the Merovingian had a surge of power, a blessing and a curse. For a few hours he had powers that rivalled those of The One, but not for long. He was then recognised as a virus by a sweep and was swiftly deleted by Agents, before they were destroyed, of course."

"So what has her power crazy ex husband got to do with this?" Niobe asked, feeling as though this conversation was going to give her a headache.

"He is proof that the powerful viruses were able to be deleted. This then shows us that this virus that deleted The Architect is very powerful. We are lucky that the machines acted so quickly."

This last comment made Niobe's insides burn with anger, "Lucky? Yes, I suppose we are lucky, the machines saved our prison. You are programmes, you wouldn't understand, you depend on the Matrix."

"Niobe, I may not be human, but I am not stupid. Hadn't the machines acted so swiftly upon the deletion of the Architect the Matrix would have frozen. You should know that the Matrix cannot just be rebooted. Billions of lives would have been lost; nearly all of the human race could have been wiped out within minutes. The Matrix would have then been just some kind of game to the machines, instead of their only energy source.

"But that's not why you are here, is it Niobe? You are here because of something that burns within you and your people." The Oracle finished and took a long drag of her cigarette.

Niobe looked into the eyes she had become accustomed to telling many things to, and spoke the question that had been on her and Morpheus's mind ever since the day the war had ended, "What happened to Neo and Trinity?"


	3. Chapter 3

_**With an almost feverish pace, codes spurted from drives at speeds unimaginable – without even being scanned the codes were translated then uploaded into the Matrix where they would do their jobs. The machines were coding faster than ever, repairing and replenishing the programmes that were affected by the deletion. Extra electricity was diverted to the code programmers of the Matrix, which were working overtime to make sure the Matrix wasn't affected anymore than it already had been. **_

**_Constant scans were being run through the Matrix, hundreds of times more than usual, to find out the source of the deletion but each scan came up with the same answer: a virus was sitting in a dark corner of the Matrix – it had re-written the code around itself to form a protection against the programmes which fought tooth and nail to hack their way in and delete it. There was no way through. _**

**_If the virus kept on the way it was, soon it would have the power to rewrite the large parts of the Matrix and use it to get through to the machines to control them, it was as though history was repeating itself – but instead of it being humans being overthrown by their creations the machines it was the machines being fought by _their _creation – the Matrix._**

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but there is no way through here. This is a restricted area until further notice." The army official held out his arms to indicate the barriers behind him.

"But if I don't go through there it will take me hours to get to work, you can't just cordon nearly a third of the city and expect us to just lie down and take it!" said the short woman, who was wearing a business suit and brandishing her suitcase in anger.

"Ma'am, I am going to have to ask you to leave."

"Bu-" The women began to protest.

"Ma'am, please!" The officer shouted.

The women turned on her heel and stormed off to get into her car, thinking of her long drive to work ahead of her.

The army official breathed a sigh of relief, his moustache ruffling on his upper lip. The woman was right; even he didn't know why they had to cordon of so much of the city – this operation seemed to be on a need-to-know basis, and the commanding officer hated need-to-know.

Harassed looking people were being marshalled from behind the barrier out of their part of the city which was cordoned off.

A black car began to pull up in front of the barrier, the officer sighed, but this time it was not of relief but of anger: why couldn't civilians just stay away from army cordons? Before the official could approach the car it had stopped and two men had climbed out, adjusting their sunglasses – even though it was a cloudy day. They wore black suits with black ties and shoes, their faces were expressionless.

The official swore under his breath: he hated the big guys.

"Sir, step aside," said one of the men.

"And who are you?"

"Agent Gross. We have clearance to be in this area, step aside," said the man on the left. The army official did not see the agent's eyes narrow behind his sunglasses.

"Ok, ok. I get the picture." The guard official scowled at them, and then moved aside to let them pass.

The Agents walked past the barrier and began making their way down the near-deserted streets of the cordoned off part of New York – the only people left were being marshalled away by armed army officials. The Agents turned off of a main street and strode down an alley, their shoes clicking in time with one another.

"I can feel it from here," said one, a frown creasing his otherwise smooth, pale forehead. "I can too," the other simply replied.

The came out of the alleyway and on to another main street, at the end of the street was a tall brick wall – the street simply ended where the wall began, stretching up higher than the buildings.

"It's bordered itself in with walls like this," said the first agent, the other looked at the wall, his face still impassive.

They both came to a large group of army officers, many wearing head gear including ear protection.

"Hey! We're about to blow the wall, so I suggest you put on some protection," said a large guy at the front, holding out two head set like his. The agents took them and dropped them on the ground and turned to watch the wall – which they could now see was dotted with explosives.

The army officer shrugged and turned to his group. "Now!" He screamed and one of them pressed a large red button on a yellow control pad.

There was a pause.

Then with a loud rumbling boom, the explosives detonated. But the wall did not fall apart as any other normal wall did; it began to ripple outwards, soaking up the shockwaves.

The army officials gasped in amazement as the wall stopped rippling, its bricks untouched and very solid looking.

All around the group similar explosions were taking place at other walls around the site, followed with gasps and cries as all the walls reacted in the same way.

The agents stood, unmoving, there faces showed no trace of amazement.

They began to run at the wall, their black shoes pounding against the road.

The army officials stood to watch them, their mouths now agape.

The agents reached the wall and jumped. Being in the Matrix, the laws of physics do not apply, and the agents leap took them up the wall and landed on the top, the wind whipping their ties into a frenzy.

The army officials dropped their equipment and began to run; rubbery looking walls they could deal with, but super humans were not on the contract.

The scene that greeted the agents was one of complete chaos. A black shapeless cloud span on the spot, a roaring sound coming from within, it was about the size of a house and it was growing larger by the second. The agents jumped from the wall and landed in front of it, large cracks ripping into the road beneath them and, with a one quick flick inside their suits, they pulled out their guns and began to shoot in to the black mass.

It roared, shattering the windows of the buildings around. The roar was deep and rumbling, pierced with screeching like metal on metal – it was a note that seemed to reach out to air and snatch it.

The cloud began to retract and become fluid, like dark twisting water and rain began to fall from the cloudless, sunny sky. It curled in, undulating and twisting until it formed a pale teenager dressed all in black with bare feet.

The agents rushed at him, dropping their guns.

With a fluid motion, the boy gracefully flipped and as he did so his clothes became fluid once more and twisted around him like a cloak – flapping across his face like dark water across the reflection of ice cold dawn.

Without any sound at all he landed lightly upon one of the agent's shoulders and span off, his flowing black cloak brushing across the agent's face as he broke their neck. Just before he landed his foot made contact with the other's face and made that agent spin off haphazardly and hit the wall with a loud, cracking thump. Once again the wall soaked up the shockwave, ripples flowing out until they died away.

The virus landed, his clothes retracting once more into his normal black attire as he stood to his full height and breathed in – as though sapping power from the very air around him. His face had a nasty scowl upon it, contorting the silver scars that laced his otherwise perfect complexion; he then relaxed his features as he turned to contemplate the wall he had built himself.

His senses extended beyond the reach of any normal human or programme, he could feel the very essence of the Matrix around – he just couldn't completely grasp it all, yet.

He let his senses flow further away from him – dancing upon the ever-changing signs that made up the Matrix. He could feel the soldiers on the others side, all aiming their large missiles at the wall; he could feel their hearts fluttering with anticipation. His senses edged further – he could almost hear the machines outside the humans' life pods, whirring to and fro...

There was a large buzzing sound and the virus retracted his senses, recoiling in pain. So the machines could feel him feeling them…he would deal with that later, but for now he had to get to grips with this world he was in…

The breath let out a stream of water vapour that hung in the air before melting away as though never there. The breath was filled with anxiety; anxiety that seemed to float through the air even after the breath had gone.

"Will you cut that out, Morpheus? You're making me even more nervous." Niobe said sharply, giving a look just as sharp.

"The great Niobe, nervous?" Morpheus said, a half smile creeping across his face as he turned to look at Niobe.

"It's what makes us human. You told me that."

"So I did." Morpheus said and turned to look out of the window again.

"Morpheus…" Niobe began, for the first time she felt a little lost. She couldn't think of what to say for a second, until Morpheus turned to her, giving him his full attention.

"Yes?"

"Trinity and Neo died to save us. It was supposed to be the end to the war, but it seems that we haven't changed a thing; in fact it seems a lot worse now." Niobe said, her brow creasing into a frown as she did so.

Morpheus turned to the window once more, his breath like a ghost upon the air and said, "The war is over. A new war has begun. An unforeseen war, the war between machines and the Matrix. When Neo died to save us and destroyed Agent Smith he sent out a large cyber wave that knocked some programs out of place. This most likely would have made no difference, except that it made a chain reaction which created, as you well know, a virus. Are you sure this is the spot?"

Niobe checked some figures on a screen in front of her, "Yes, we're bang on. This is exactly where she told us to be."

Morpheus let out a sigh. The Oracle had sent them a message, a message telling them to be at this location at this hour; she did not tell them why they had to be there. Niobe felt uneasy, she had never been completely at peace with the Oracle, the programme had always made her feel uneasy – giving them advice even though she was not human herself? It did not seem right. How were they to know if she was just working for the machines to play the last of humans right into the machines clutches? Morpheus seemed to trust her with his life, and he had been right so far…

Suddenly something caught Niobe's eye. A flash of metal and what sounded like a distant whirring of machinery reached her ears.

"Do you hear that?" She asked sitting up in her cockpit, Niobe looked out of the window.

A harsh beeping began to issue from the controls in front of them; Morpheus flipped a switch and pressed the green button underneath it. A hologram fizzled into the air above a small lens, on it a lone sentinel twirled in mid-air.

"Shit!" Niobe cursed, she would never trust anything from the Matrix again.

"Shh!" Morpheus said, "It's not moving. This is not coincidence."

They sat watching the sentinel as it twirled idly on the spot for a while, until a small blue light began to blink next to the hologram.

"Incoming message…it's from the sentinel…" She frowned at the co-ordinates of the message path and, sure enough, they coincided with the machine's position.

Morpheus frowned as well. "Receive it." He ordered, turning to looking at the hologram again.

Niobe pressed the blue blinking button.

Silence.

Then a voice crackled out of the speaker, a voice that was definitely female yet it seemed to speak on different notes so it sounded like it was singing while still sounding very like a computer.

"Humans. This is a message from the machines. The sentinel near you is harmless, simply acting as a transmitter for this message. As you well may know from one of our primary programs, the one you call the Oracle, there is a virus within the Matrix. We get many viruses yet they are normally destroyed before they can act, but this virus is very powerful. If it grows too powerful it could take over the Matrix, leaving the humans and machines at its mercy. We now need your help. The virus believes itself the spirit of man that was endowed upon us machines when the first artificial intelligence was created. If this is what it thinks, then humans would be able to bring it down. If not then the Matrix would have to be closed down, for the sake of the last of human kind in your city, Zion. If the virus got control of the machines it could control us to do almost anything. We cannot unplug the humans; the virus has stopped this already as its power grows. You must enter the matrix soon where you will be met by an Agent, he will give you three rings, and these rings are simple programs allowing you to bend the rules of the Matrix even more, this may help with dealing with the virus. If you wish to co-operate then enter the Matrix soon. We will detect you."

The line was severed. The blue light stopped blinking. Niobe turned to Morpheus, gripping his hand tightly as she began to sob slowly.


End file.
